Media Architecture has been driven by technology - certainly by the refinement of LED components originally used in LED advertising billboards; but also by development of sustainable computing and network systems able to operate extensive façade data systems over the entire life-cycle, and within the maintenance constraints demanded by architects and building owners. conference panel addresses evolution of new building materials bearing ultra-high brightness LEDs and light-steering optics, but it also covers significant issues posed by image generation and diagnostics. Lessons from existing lighting control and building management system installations will be evaluated and sustainable and fault-tolerant computer systems considered. Equally important, the real demands placed on cabling systems and configuration software will be presented in the context of survivability, maintenance and the need for installation and support within an expanded construction industry.

The emergence of ubiquitous LED media creates new challenges for the urban space. While experience with LED lighting and moving imagery billboards during the last ten years has given rise to concerns of light pollution and regulation in some cities to prevent ingress of television-style advertising into the public space, the evolution of media architecture presents more complex issues. LED replacement of basic building lighting will produce huge energy savings during the next ten years and substitution of traditional neon brand marks leads to similar reductions in maintenance costs. Moreover, new LED lighting of unprecedented brightness allows whole building structures, rather than signage alone, to reflect corporate branding. These technologies, as much as display elements built into structural elements, shaders and cladding will transform the urban environment as much as electric light did during the last century. Unlike conventional lighting, however, LED media is readily networked; able to carry information - cultural as well as corporate - it creates a new medium in the public space.

There is a fundamental relationship between public imagery and architecture which dates from the earliest built structures, and at one level new display technologies simply layer upon this history. However, at other levels new media are forging a paradigm shift in this relationship. Firstly, media façades already combine aspects of lighting and graphics in formats determined by the architecture, and differ fundamentally and not just in resolution from the rectilinear image. Secondly, moving imagery has increasingly become interactive and emergent - synthesised from or driven by information from the environment, whether it be from within the building or from the outside world, through channels such as the internet - displacing narrative clips originating in other media. Such notions of the building/environment as author promote lighting and image as significant elements of the visual perception of the three dimensional structure of the architecture.

The relationshivp between media architecture and fine art is less clear, however. Constraints of display resolution – often a fraction of a conventional video image - and complicated access from mobile devices reduce the potential scope of media art works. It is possible that imagery for architectural displays will become the preserve of a new class of content makers more closely related to the fields of lighting and event design than that of art.

Contemporary Lighting Master Plans define the underlying conditions for lighting public spaces: intelligent harmonization of all light sources on the urban stage in order to give the greatest flexibility while at the same time consuming as little energy as possible. A new perception-oriented approach to lighting planning for architecture and urban areas is now becoming significant, in contrast to earlier technical-functional methods. Accentuated by the paradigm shift towards the “reflecting city” from the traditional stone and transluzenten (glass) cities, responsibilities for transforming the townscape and the city identity have now received political meaning.

Profile: Peter Cornwell has worked with computer image generation in both art and commercial applications since studying painting and then computing science. He worked on early computer graphics for television with The Moving Picture Company and on computer aided design and robotic manufacturing systems as manager of European research and development for Texas Instruments. Later he formed Division, Inc., a virtual reality (VR) company in California, which developed commercial 3D visualisation products for architecture, pharmaceutical and aerospace companies and became a public company. More recently he has been professor of both Computing Science and Media Art; director of the Visual Theory Group, Imperial College, London, and teaching at the Royal College and Academy of Arts and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. He has been director of the Institute for Visual Media, ZKM, Germany and has exhibited in major spaces such as the RA and ICA, London; Kiasma, Helsinki; ICC, Tokyo and ZKM, Germany. He is a member of artist group Flunk and with his design company blip he has undertaken LED projects such as CocaCola and Samsung in central London.

What is an environmental history of urban inscriptions? How does pervasive computing shift that concern? From graffiti to state proclamations to the contentions of branding, and from petroglyphs to banners to lit facades, the architecture of the city has been layered with lasting messages. While some kinds of inscriptions have always been admired and others regarded as nuisance, and while prominent inscriptions must have held some greater power in a less information-saturated world, today’s developments accelerate the pace, scale, and responsiveness of fixed communications to the point where these issues transform. Environmental history asks not only how humanity has patterned its settlements, but also how those have influenced entire biomes, and transformed notions of nature and artifice. This talk attempts to put current developments in urban signage into such larger cultural perspective.

Dr. David Cunningham (UK) University of Westminster

Presentation Title: Advertising Architecture

Abstract: Coined by Adolf Behne, the concept of ‘advertising architecture’ (Reklamerarchitektur) was first applied to the department store buildings of the architect Eric Mendelsohn. Looking back to the period in which Mendelsohn was working, in his paper David Cunningham will also seek to explore the contemporary resonances of such a concept in the context of emergent discourses surrounding the relationship between architecture and new forms of media more generally. A concept of advertising architecture in this way raises questions about both the commodity status of architecture today, and the changing relationships of form to function, the building-object to the urban.

Dr Mark Dorrian (UK)University of Edinburgh

Presentation Title: Google Earth: Terrestrial Mediatization

Abstract: The presentation will reflect on the rise of Google Earth, analyzing it in the context of Google’s holistic ideology. It will pay close attention to the programme’s interface, examining how its solicits the user and the kind of global imaginary that results. The implications of the mediatization of the terrestrial surface via satellite imagery will be considered, and the consequent mass migration of the consumer’s eye into space. The hybrid ‘mashups’ of text, diagram, and photographic image pioneered by Google increasingly become an actual practice projected and constructed at large scale upon sites on the ground and addressed to a mass market that is now ‘in the sky’.

Jan Edler (GER) realities:united

Presentation Title: Contemporary Architecture

Jan Edler studied architecture at the Technische Universität Aachen and at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. Tim Edler studied computer science and architecture at Technische Universität Berlin. The brothers work as architects, designer and artists. In 2000 they founded their office „realities:united“ in Berlin. All their projects deal with issues of space, information, message and communication. Their creative achievements have been prized with a number of architecture and design awards, such as the Hans Schäfer Preis from the Association of German Architects (BDA), the „Inspire!Award“ by Deutsche Telekom or the „Goldene Nagel“ (Golden Nail) which is the highest award given by the Art Directors Club, and has been shown at numerous exhbitions in Europe including the Venice Biannual for Architecture (2002 & 2006), the Vitra Design Museum and the new Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Their most recognised projects to date are BIX [1], a light- and media facade at Kunsthaus Graz in 2003 that has hallmarked their international breakthrough, and SPOTS [2], a urban media installation at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.

Aside from their project-related work both of them have taught at various institutions such as the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, the Technische Universität Berlin or the Pasadena Art Center College in Los Angeles. Since 2005 Tim Edler holds a visiting professorship at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen.

Abstract: I believe that the current popular understanding within architectural discourse on interactivity is misguided, following a reactive model of human/master controls architecture/slave promoted by the software and multimedia industries. I will argue that unless architects and designers start to understand the full potential of interactive systems over reactive systems, our built environment will suffer from a form of homogenization and limiting of opportunities that we see evident in the software design. To do this, I will present the work of a number of architects who pioneered the design of what I consider truely interactive environments in the 50’s and 60’s, and who I believe, had a more useful conceptual understanding of interaction than the one which has been diluted in contemporary culture. Following this I will suggest that recent developments in mobile robotics, AI and cognitive science, hint at relatively simple ways in which architects and designers can build adaptive systems that extend the potential of Media-Architecture beyond the human/master controls architecture/slave approach most common today.

Abstract: Against the background of the information technologies architecture has gained a new reality. No longer are objects or processes the constituting elements of a building. Now they are described as technical networks of communicating nodes, which balance themselves in contrived patterns. Different concrete examples refer to a way towards a post digital architectural future in which there are no more non-digital realities.

Rogier van der Heide (NL)ARUP LIGHTING

Presentation Title: Hyperreality in the urban context

Rogier van der Heide is a Director with Arup and Global Leader of Arup Lighting. He has been responsible for innovative, creative and well executed projects around the world in the field of exterior lighting, feature lighting, dynamic lighting and day lighting. Rogiers project list includes works by architects such as UN Studio, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid and MVRDV. Rogier will be the design leader for the lighting design on this project, overseeing the lighting team in Amsterdam. Besides over ten other design prizes, Rogier has received the two most prestigious awards in the lighting design industry: the Lighting Designer of the Year Award and the IALD Radiance Award.

Kathrin Kur (UK/GER)FLUNK

is an artist and designer working in electronic media and photography. She studied philosophy, visual arts and critical theory at FU Berlin, Brighton University and London University. Her interests are in computer assisted vision, remote imaging and film technology. From experience in film special effects, as well as production of animation for flagship LED installations at London company Streetvision, she has developed a hybrid practice and a body of work that includes video, computed and photographic works. Emerging interactive display technology and computer imagery generation techniques have produced opportunities of dynamic montage and image synthesis.

Abstract: Bright lights in big cities have fascinated architects from the start. Erich Mendelsohn published several photographs of New York’s Broadway in ‘Amerika, Bilderbuch eines Architekten’ in 1928 and was completely flabbergasted by them, in particular by a multiple exposure he had made by night that even enhanced the spectacle. The illuminated advertising signs in New York were in his view ‘one of the elements that help prevent the functional city from turning rigid’. So, even if architects are usually control freaks and very aware that they could not define the content of what would be shown, it was exactly the wild, uncontrollable nature of the phenomenon that appealed to them. It could bring their buildings and cities alive. Architects and artists together should design city centres in which these spectacles could take place.

Tim Pritlove (GER) CCC

Abstract: On September 11, 2001, Project Blinkenlights surprised the public with a low-tech, interactive light installation at the Haus des Lehrers building at Alexanderplatz, the heart of East Berlin. Using 144 windows of the building, the group set up a huge computer screen as a platform for the public to use interactive gameplay and on-demand private movie playback. The installation was quickly followed by an ever bigger installation at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris in 2002. The presentation focuses on the dynamics the project managed to establish among the people using it and the main ideas of the underlying concepts of interaction and audience integration.

Abstract: When in 1832 Victor Hugo announced that the printed book had killed the edifice, he did not mean that architects would no longer create interesting designs but that architecture had lost its function as the great work of humanity: Architecture expresses nought, not even the souvenir of the art of the past. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts because it is abandoned by human thought, it has nothing but skins and bones left.
Today, even the skin and bones of architecture are turning into dust. While corporations and cities continue to construct exceptional buildings for promotional purposes, the means of attracting attention are increasingly dependent on spectacular feats of engineering, both in the case of very tall skyscrapers and buildings clad with animated media screens. Economic and functional arguments clearly speak against that which has been the domain and expertise of architects: the shaping of monumental buildings and public space. The Uniqa Tower in Vienna is a tombstone marking this most recent death of architecture ? but it is a passing away that should not leave us bereaved.

Alexander Stublic (GER)Presentation Title: dynamic architecture

Abstract: Alexander Stublic will present four architecturally related projects in different technical environments always focusing on correlations of space by extending and transforming architectural structures.

Media artists Holger Mader, Alexander Stublic and the architect Heike Wiermann use the area of conflict of reality and simulation to investigate mechanisms of perception in public spaces.They use time-bound media such as light, video and sound.

“twists and turns”, special artistic video displayed on the Uniqa tower, Vienna, since 2006, “reprojected” on the seven screens in Munich, 2006/07, “inner city waltz”, on SPOTS-Installation, Berlin, 2007 and “façade”, Iceland, planned for 2008.

Andrew Shoben (UK)Greyworld

Presentation Title: Transforming the City into an Urban Playground

In his talk Andrew will explore ways of transforming the urban realm into a public playground. To allow some form of self-expression, through small interventions in the urban surround, in areas of the city that people see everyday but normally exclude and ignore. He will show examples of past work, in particular The Source (2004) their 32m kinetic sculpture which opens the London market every morning at the London Stock Exchange.

Abstract: During the last years, “New” Media have advanced more and more from private and semi-public institutional spaces into public city space. The reasons for this are manifold. The necessary technologies have become cheaper, more easily manageable and more stable; users of city space are media literate, and the designers and decision makers are better educated and skilled.
Since the end of the 80s, ART+COM has been working on the practical design-oriented and artistic research of such systems and their realisation. The vertical in city space, i.e. the façade, is in focus here, just as well as the horizontal as the location of media installations.
In the design of media façades, we are directed by two principles stemming from “façade’s” etymological root ‘facies”, Latin for ‘face’. We are designing the skin of a face, not a mask or make-up. This means that the media have to be an integral part of the architecture, not something added as an obvious later thought. The second principle is the face’s mimics and its expression. The narrative on the façade is thus expressive of the building, its architectural stance and its interior. The façade is a membrane from inside to outside and from outside to inside.

Mirjam Struppek (GER) Interactionfield

Profile: Mirjam Struppek works as urbanist, researcher and consultant in Berlin. She has lectured and published essays with a special focus on the livability of urban space, public sphere and its transformation and acquisition through new media. Since 2002 she is developing the online-information-platform interactionfield about the relation of interaction, new media and public space. In this context she organises the monthly lecture and discussion evening „Urban Media Salon“. Currently she works on her concept of “Urban Screens” after developing the first international conference Urban Screens 05 about “the potential of outdoor screens for urban society”. In 2003 she worked as Assistant in a gallery for still and motion pictures in Berlin. She is holding a degree with distinction in Urban- and Environmental Planning from University of Kaiserslautern and spent in 1999 two research semester at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Nagoya University, Japan.

is a digital media artist, information designer and researcher working in both the commercial and media art fields. After postgraduate study at the Royal Academy Schools in London, he went on to develop a collaborative and multidisciplinary practice, which utilises a wide range of media. He is a member of the International Centre of Fine Art Research at the University of London and works at Central Saint Martins London. His creative and production work with BLIP has focused on developing content strategies to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving network of daylight compatible LED billboards and hybrid architectural media facades, working with clients such as Barclays Bank, Coca-Cola and Samsung.

Abstract: The group’s main innovations arise from its simultaneous reformulation of all of the architectural, structural and electronic components required for next-generation media facades so that display and built structure merge functionally, technically and aesthetically. mediafacade.net is a research group comprising design consultancies and major architectural and manufacturing companies as well as research institutions.

Els Vermang (BE)
LAb[au]

Presentation title: MetaDeSIGN

The recent Dexia Tower project in Brussels, shows LAb[au]’s approach towards ‘media-architecture’ as being a spatial and temporal programming of light which can create an interactive relationship in between the user, the building and the city, entirely transforming the conception of media facade as generic content displays, towards new vectors to think architecture, art and public space.

In the recent project ‘Touch’ the design aesthetics are directly deduced from abstract art such as Mondriaans ‘elementarism’ and Kandinsky’s ‘point and line to plane’ as the skyscrapers architecture, where points = pixels = windows, lines and diagonals = levels and edges of the building and surfaces = facades, thus focusing on the relational qualities expressed by an elementary language, and exploiting interactivity not as being a control system but rather as a catalyst for these relational / representational parameters. For the permanent enlightening, the project ‘Who’s afraid of Red, Green and Blue’ draws reference to the philosophy of Barnett Newman, researching a symbolic value in abstract art by using colour and time.